Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about Pope Benedict XVI visit with David Gibson, author of THE RULE OF BENEDICT.

Q: How significant is a papal visit to the U.S.?

A: A papal visit to the U.S. is almost like a snapshot of Catholic life in America. This is one of the most influential flocks in the entire 1.1 billion Catholic communion around the world, and even though American Catholics are only six, seven percent of the entire Catholic global population, like America itself, the Catholic Church worldwide often follows its cues from America. So it's a really important moment in the life of the church, not only in the United States but also globally, worldwide. That's why there's a lot at stake both for American Catholics, but also for the Vatican and for Pope Benedict XVI.

Q: How relevant is Pope Benedict to the lives of American Catholics?

A: It's a real question as to how relevant any pope is to the daily and weekly faith lives of American Catholics. If you go by the polls and by how much Catholics heed church teachings or even heed what the pope says, and this goes across the spectrum left and right, we're all cafeteria Catholics to a great degree. Then you might look at those polls and say, well, American Catholics really don't heed what the pope says, so you sort of think he's not that important, really, to the church in America. But on another level, and an almost more important level, he's vitally important for American Catholics in the sense that he's a point of unity, a real focal point. American Catholics often love to criticize the pope but don't let anybody else criticize the pope, because he's our pope, and that's a kind of superficial way of putting it, but in a real way he represents continuity with the past. He represents continuity with a future that hasn't yet come, and he also represents the universality and the connection with all of those other Catholics around the world. It's a Catholic Church both with an upper case "c" and a lower case "c," and when the pope, whoever he is, comes to America, he's really reminding Catholics in the United States of the larger Catholic world out there, as well as their larger responsibilities and obligations.

Q: Benedict has been pope for a while, but to what extent is this still an introduction of him to American Catholics?

A: This really, in a big way, is the pope's debut to American Catholics. There's no way around that. How important is a pope to American Catholics -- you debate that and can cut it in a lot of different ways. There's no doubt that John Paul II, who many call John Paul the Great, was an enormously popular figure here in the United States. Only about 4 in 10 Catholics in the United States could name their bishop; one hundred percent knew who their pope was. It's almost like John Paul II became every Catholic's pastor. He was so present. He came here four or five times, all around the country, a very charismatic, huge personality, and John Paul II came here within the year of his election. Pope Benedict XVI is in many ways a different case from John Paul II. We knew that from the very beginning. He will be celebrating his eighty-first birthday when he's here in the United States, but he will also be celebrating the third anniversary of his election. So it's taken him three years to get across the Atlantic, he's an older man, also just by policy he doesn't want to travel quite as much as John Paul II did. So it's not really a case of whether Catholics in America don't agree with the pope or do agree with the pope or love him or are hot and cold on him. It's really a question of they don't know who he is. This is a real introduction of Pope Benedict XVI to the church in America. The real question coming out of that is how much will Pope Benedict XVI learn about America and the church itself.

Q: You mentioned earlier that there may be several things at stake with this visit. What do you think the key issues are?

A: I think to a great degree this visit, the first visit of Pope Benedict XVI as pope to America, is going to have a very symbolic kind of import. I don't think there is going to be a lot of expectation, and rightfully so, that he's going to make any great breakthroughs or even get into any of the problematic and contentious issues in American Catholicism -- the role of women, sexuality, birth control, that sort of thing. He's going to tow the line very much that way. I think the central issue for American Catholics is what he is going to say or not going to say about the sexual abuse crisis. This is something like a bad hangover that is sticking with the American church years after the scandal erupted in 2002. There was a great deal of lobbying and pressure put on the pope and the Vatican to try and get him to go to Boston, the kind of epicenter of the sexual abuse crisis. In the end Benedict opted not to go to Boston, [but] to go to Washington, the capital, and to New York. By not going to the ground zero, let's say, of the sexual abuse scandal, he already sent a signal that he's not going to delve too deeply into that issue. That makes what he says even more important. There are indications that he is going to address it in some way. But will he address it in a forthright way, in a way that satisfies peoples' concern that the Vatican, and more importantly the pope, gets it, gets how much the church has felt betrayed, gets how much the victims have suffered and been abused? So the fact that he's not going to Boston almost ramps up the importance of the words Pope Benedict uses when he's in New York and in Washington on this issue. It's important to note that this visit is officially a visit of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, to the United Nations and the church in Washington and New York. In a sense, this isn't a pastoral visit as much as it is the pope coming here to use the world's biggest platform, the General Assembly at the United Nations in New York, to broadcast a message about human rights and international relations and some of those other overarching moral concerns that he has for the international community. He will be celebrating a Mass at a baseball station in Washington and at Yankee Stadium in New York, of course, but a lot of the focus -- we're in the middle of a campaign season -- will be on political issues and international issues, so there won't be that much space, really, for pastoral concerns for the pope to address and to meet Catholics in the United States, which again puts more weight on those moments when he is in his role as pastor.

Q: Talk about the importance of the church's role in the world or the importance of the pope as an international moral voice. How important is that role, and how important is his visit to the UN?

A: The pope in the modern era really has been an important international leader, certainly since World War II and the focus then on Pius XII as there continues to be a debate about him. But popes really have become international figures since Paul VI began traveling internationally in the 1960s: he went to the Holy Land, he went to India, he came here to New York as well. And then, of course, John Paul II, you know, almost matchless in the attention and the stature that brought to the papacy in terms of international relations. The guy who vaulted the Berlin Wall went back to his communist homeland and helped bring down the Iron Curtain. No doubt about that. That really raised the profile of the pope and the influence of the pope. And Benedict XVI, while he is not quite the figure that John Paul was on the international stage, still carries a great deal of influence, and his words still carry a great deal of weight. You can also see this in two ways. One, religion, despite what the secularization theory used to say, that religion was going to disappear, religion has had a great resurgence in the world for good and for ill. Religious leaders are also very important because of that. Secondly, the challenge of Islam to the West is a bigger issue than it ever was, obviously, because of 9/11 and the aftermath of that. Radical Islam today and the relations between Islam and the West and between Christians and Muslims could be said to be the cold war issue of our day. Benedict XVI has already shown that his words carry great weight in the controversy that he stirred up in his lecture in 2006 at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria. Just the reaction to the pope's lecture in Regensburg in 2006 and the violence and the tensions that were raised showed how important a figure he can be for good and for ill. Fortunately, and interestingly, almost two years on from that, the Catholic and Islamic community had moved toward a burgeoning dialogue on a lot of these very difficult issues. Because of the role of religion in the world today and its growing importance, one could say this inter-religious dialogue is as important as anything that goes on there at the United Nations in the General Assembly.

Q: The pope is meeting with interfaith leaders during his visit. How important are the church's interfaith relations and how significant would a photo-op here in the United States be?

A: The church's relations with other religions are vitally important because of the role that religion is playing in the world, be it Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, you name it. These are vital communities. These are powerful political, religious, cultural forces, ethnic forces in the world, so the church's relations, and in this case the pope's relations with other religions are not necessarily the same thing, because local relations can be better or worse than the pope's personal dialogue with religious leaders. But, again, they're all very, very important. The thing about the pope's visit to the United States is because it is such a relatively short time frame and because the pope is a bit older -- he doesn't do as many events in a day as John Paul II did, for example -- they are having to include a lot, all of the different religions basically in one event, in one relatively brief event, which is going to make it a kind of little more than a photo-op, and again, how valuable is that going to be? He is going to be talking to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. in one meeting. These are religions that have greatly different agendas from the Catholic Church, from the Christian community, and from each other, so there's really not so much in an event like this that the pope can say or that they can say to the pope that could go beyond really general, reaffirming general principles. Some would see that, frankly, as almost a lost opportunity. Because of the religious diversity of the United States, a meeting like this between the pope and other religious leaders is seen as an ideal kind of forum here in the United States. This is the kind of almost neutral territory where everybody could perhaps plant some seeds for future dialogue and improve relations. It doesn't look like it's going to happen on this visit simply because of the time frame and the pope's priorities. In this regard, inter-religious dialogue is not the highest priority for this pope. It's really about the UN and speaking to the Catholic Church in the United States.

Q: Benedict is meeting with Catholic educators, and there have been some tensions between the academic community and this pope, who is himself an academic. How would you characterize those relations between the U.S. Catholic academic community generally and this pope?

A: Relations between the Catholic university system here in the United States, which is really the pride of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, have always been a bit difficult, because you're talking about two completely different cultures, an American culture of free inquiry and a Vatican culture that wants certain limits to how far reason can go. They want to see a balance between faith and reason, and the university system in America wants to be in sync, really, with the values of a traditional university system and also with traditional American culture, and those tensions have really been there, have been problematic for the past twenty-five years, really, for the time that Joseph Ratzinger was in Rome. Many of those tensions were played out in relations with Cardinal Joseph [Ratzinger] when he was head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and you're going to see some of the issue be played out here now when the pope is in the United States as he is talking to Catholic educators, for one very good reason: This pope is and always has been an academic, a professor, a theologian. The university is sanctuary for him in many ways. He's as comfortable at the lectern as he is in the pulpit. Someone has described his pontificate as the pastoral care of intellect. If John Paul II guided your soul through your heart, Benedict gets at your soul through your head in many ways, so he sees the proper use of reason, the proper functioning of the university within the Catholic context, as vitally important to the propagation of faith, to the explanation of doctrine, and to the future of the Catholic Church. So he is going want to make sure that they get the message loud and clear that while he is here that they know that he wants the Catholic identity of Catholic universities to be reinforced and to be projected even more strongly. He wants people who go to a Catholic university to know they are in a Catholic school.

Q: Is it ironic that there are those tensions, given his academic credentials?

A: It's a bit ironic, isn't it? I mean, he is a professor and an academic. He's someone who's grown up in universities, and that's really his only ambition, certainly in the past ten years -- to retire and go back to Regensburg to the small town university life that he loved and write books. But it's also odd in the sense that universities are places of inquiry, they're places where you ask questions. All the greatest heretics in the world in Christendom came out of universities. From Martin Luther -- a heretic in the Catholic Church's views -- to generations before him, universities have always been in tension with the church. Universities grew out of the church in many respects, and the church ran and continues to run universities around the world, but there's always that tension between free inquiry and the revelation of faith. Where does one end and the other begin? How do they mesh? This is a great theme, a vastly important theme for Pope Benedict XVI, this relationship between faith and reason, and in no other arena does it play out as vividly and often contentiously as in the universities.

Q: Another big issue for the US church is the priest shortage and the concern the pope has with that.

A: One of the issues that American Catholics are going to be looking for the pope to address is the priest shortage. You can't deny the numbers. Nobody does. The number of vocations are decreasing, plummeting. The priesthood is getting older. Priests have really been trapped in the middle here, with the decline in the number of vocations and the sexual abuse scandal. This really hammered those guys, and they're really feeling the pressure. They're getting older, they don't have a lot of younger guys coming in behind them, and people in the pews see it. The United States is importing more and more priests. One in five, one in six parishes has a foreign-born priest in it. They see that there aren't as many priests there, that the priests that they do have are under stress, don't have time to prepare homilies, are barely, you know, are stretched so thin they are just overworked and really overburdened, as much as they love their vocation and life as priests. American Catholics and American priests want to hear what the pope is going to say about the vocations crisis. Without the Eucharist it's tough to have a vibrant Catholic church, and that's the bottom line, and Pope Benedict would agree with that. But what does he say to that? Historically he has said, look, you know, we are not here to change the traditions and teachings of the church. Don't really look for him to put celibacy on the table, certainly not when he's here, and he's reaffirmed his preference for this pontificate to keep celibacy the norm for priests. The pope wants to say we have to pray harder, we have to ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We as the church and as the priesthood are being put through a little bit of a trial here, and we have to respond, to pray harder and pray for vocations, and we have to have faith that those vocations will come. Is that going to be a good enough answer for the priests in America or for the faithful? That's a good question.

Q: Any other thoughts about this papal visit?

A: What American Catholics are really going to notice, first off, is the difference between John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and for a lot of people it will be a real shock to a degree and something of a -- I hate to use the word -- a disappointment. Benedict the XVI is not as much of a showman, and that is purposely so. It's not just the fact that he is 81 years old. He also wants to lower the profile, to a degree, of the pope. John Paul II sought to draw people to the church and to Christ by drawing them to himself, by being a convincing figure himself, by being a charismatic figure demonstrating through his life what the love of God and Christ has done. Benedict XVI wants to get out of the way and let the light of Christ shine through. He wants people to be drawn to the church, to Jesus, to the sacraments for what they are. He wants to step out of the way. Here is Pope Benedict XVI, this German theologian, 81 years old, coming in the midst of this celebrity culture, where the finals of "American Idol" are going to be transfixing gazillions of viewers, those who aren't going to be tuned into the pope, and he is going to have to try and find a way to be convincing to those people who will take a moment out of their day and listen to him, and if people do stop and listen to the pope, I think they will find him a fascinating man. He might not be saying at all what they want to hear, but he is a fascinating man. I think in many ways he's the catechist in chief. If John Paul II was the great pastor of the church, a great showman for God, as some people said, who could draw thousands to outdoor stadiums to himself, Pope Benedict XVI was and is and remains a teacher, and that is the kind of person people should expect when he comes.